Even before he formally declared for mayor, Zohran Mamdani’s supporters and critics agreed on one thing: His toughest challenge would be addressing the issue of public safety in New York and winning over a highly skeptical police force. In July, all 13 NYC public safety unions endorsed Mayor Eric Adams, who has since dropped out.  

Mamdani has gone about the project of winning support from the police in the same fashion that has made him such an effective campaigner generally—by listening. And as mayor, he could end up achieving something that has eluded other mayors: real reform that unites the interests of citizens and ordinary cops. Or, as he puts it, “reconciling safety with justice.”

Without fanfare, Mamdani has been meeting in small groups with hundreds of rank-and-file patrolmen and women to listen to what’s on their minds. The thing about active listening is not that it makes great campaign video—it’s that you learn things. Mamdani’s meetings with beat cops are on a par with his famous conversations with Halal street vendors, in which he learned that the price of a plate of lamb or chicken is $2 more than it should be because they have to bribe middlemen to get permits.

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In his meetings with cops, Mamdani learned that police are quitting the department at the rate of 350 a month, up from 200 a month when he began his campaign, mainly because of forced overtime. “You plan a weekend with your family and at the last minute you are told you have to work,” Mamdani said on a recent edition of The View with Whoopi Goldberg.

Why compulsory overtime? “Because we ask cops to do everything,” Mamdani added. “We’re asking cops to handle mental health calls, we’re asking them to deal with homelessness.” Mamdani pointed out that police respond to 200,000 mental health calls every year. “So our proposal is to allow the officers to do their jobs of dealing with serious crime, and create a Department of Community Safety that deals with homelessness and the mental health crisis.”

Not bad. Mamdani’s proposals chime with longstanding reform ideas like those of Georgetown professor Rosa Brooks, whose book, Tangled up in Blue, points out that police spend far too much time dealing with infractions such as motor vehicle violations (which could be handled mostly by cameras), and far too little time dealing with actual crime.

In New York, Eric Adams got elected promising to redouble New York’s emphasis on “broken windows” policing, putting cops more visibly on display, especially in poor and minority neighborhoods. An authoritative review article by political scientist Milo Ward found that “broken windows” policing generally did not reduce street crime, only the fear of crime. Meanwhile, major crimes have declined somewhat, but not enough to make New Yorkers feel entirely safe or cops feel appreciated.

Mamdani has been under fire for his earlier support of “defund the police” rhetoric. The deft thing about his proposed Department of Community Safety is that it would adopt the related idea of creating a separate agency to deal with calls having to do with domestic violence and mental illness, but in order to help, not anger, ordinary cops.

An emblematic decision Mamdani will need to make is whether to reappoint Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, Eric Adams’s sole competent appointee. Tisch, from a billionaire family, is less an ideologue than a competent public manager, having been formerly sanitation commissioner. Appointing Tisch would be reassuring to the city’s elite and the police brass, but dismaying to some of Mamdani’s base.

Should he decide to go elsewhere, one obvious choice would be former Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison, who has praised Mamdani’s view of policing but stopped just short of a formal endorsement. Harrison was former NYC chief of detectives and then in 2021 was promoted to chief of department, the highest-ranking uniformed member of the NYPD.

One thing that has helped is that Mamdani supporters to his left, who were so important in his door-knocking campaign, for the most part have refrained from carping that he is not quite as purist as some might like on loaded topics such as Gaza and policing. They appreciate what they have in Mamdani and want to see him elected. Once he is in office, pressure from all sides will continue.